Daniel Vavra is a Czech writer, game designer, and game director, who is perhaps best known for his work on the games Mafia and Mafia II. In 2011, he founded Warhorse Studios, an independent game dev studio.

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Career in Gaming

Kingdom Come: Deliverance

In creating Warhorse, Vavra had hoped to give his dream project, a historically accurate, medieval RPG, set in medieval Czech Republic (Bohemia). The project was backed by a successful Kickstarter campaign, asking for £300,000, and drawing in over £1,000,000. [1] The project was criticized by a tumblr user, MedievalPOC, who noted a lack of female, and "POC" representation. [2] This angle was picked up and supported both by Kotaku and The Daily Dot, who defended the critique, calling the ask for women/POC both an "[h]onest and interesting" and "academic" question. [3][4]

Role in GamerGate

An early pro-GG voice, Vavra regularly clashed with anti-GG journalists and devs. In a 2014 interview with TechRaptor, Vavra described numerous problems within gaming journalism and the gaming industry, as well as how they affected him as an independent game developer. [5]

Along a similar vein to the MedievalPOC incident from earlier in the year, Vavra got into a spat on Twitter with Arthur Gies[6][7], who at the time was criticizing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for its depiction of women, and overt lack of "any single non-white humanoid anywhere". [8]